They came up in a bountiful garden—much of the fruit was as big as people. "Are you still hungry, Isolde?"

"Mother."

"You can forget me calling you mother." Pawel chuckled, just at the absurdity of this woman being that close to him. "Anyway, what creature would grow a garden like this?"

"The giant who stole the wealth of your father's land."

" Hrm." That could mean several different things, but it wasn't his father. "Well, let's see this wealth of the giants."

A cottage loomed into view once they cleared the tomatoes, same design as the one they left in the beanstalks except clean, fresh thatching, whitewashed. That was distinctive enough a change, forget that this thing made them look like rats. A crack in the foundation made it easy to get in without waiting on the giant's movements.

Not that their caution kept them away from the giant. He was a great woolly thing with his feet almost in his fireplace as he carved a piece of wood into a new pipe bowl while puffing on a gnarled one that had seen better days. The rings of tobacco were heavy but mostly well above them.

Pawel helped Isolde up on the table. Chests of gold coins and shavings littered the surface along with plates of bones. Many of them clearly belonged to humans.

Isolde went for a gold coin the size of a dinner plate, trying to wrestle it out of a chest, only to have it clink on the table as it tipped her over.

"Fee fie foe fummm... Damn this rhyme is so dumb. Fuck it, Isole!" The giant grabbed the woman by her torso in one hand as he leaned across the table. He stared at her before slowly raising a finger from his other hand to trace her face—more like blot the whole thing out. "My love, this has gone on long enough. Come back to me."

"You're not Jack's father!"

The giant growled in rage, nearly slamming the fist he held his supposed wife in down with enough force to end her. "There is no Jack. Our child was a stillborn!"

"Jack is right there!" Isolde had managed to worm one arm free and pointed right at Powel, who was slowly backing off the top of the table.

Powel stayed still, his breath catching. The giant didn't even look towards him. "My love, there is no son, no person named Jack. I'm going to put you with what is left of your mother, let her soothe your heart."

The giant leaned forward, whittling and knife clattering to the stone floor, nearly beating his own foot into a pulp on its way down. He opened a cage with a goose and took it out, letting it wander around the secured room while he stuffed Isolde in. The sound of a harp twanging was the last sound from above before the fowl started flapping around and honking too loud for Pawel to hear what went on in that cage.

The goose finally found him cornered under the edge of a bowl before the giant picked it up and set about soothing the bird until he could put it in a nest on the table—the bones of men being where the bird laid a perfectly golden egg before she settled to brood.

Pawel sat up on the surface, stumped. What was he supposed to be doing, here? A never-ending supply of gold could crush a nation's market, so the goose would be better for his people if it was dead. The coins on the table looked as cheaply made as any gold coins of the era, a greedy King's inflation.

That made Pawel sigh in frustration, as it was his own grandfather that had done it. Still, the man's death had affected their father greatly, and has not been the same since. His younger brothers were too little to see it.

It was clear to him that he was supposed to steal from the giant, given the history between the "mother", "jack" and whatever the giant had in the cage with Isolde. The problem was that almost anything would get the giant to go grab him as quickly as he did the woman—considering all the bones, he'd be dead. Whatever favor the monster had for her wouldn't save him. So, he had to sow chaos, and be the cause of insanity.

Pawel waited until the giant fell asleep: pipe long dead, clattering to the floor, knife and whittling loosely in his hands, the snore of a thousand bears wafting through his nostrils. Then off the table and up the burls in the wall post next to the cage, to see what was the issue there.

Isolde had her back to him, bickering with a golden lyre. The voice of the carving on one side had a musical quality to it, which made it harder to understand.

Knowing how the woman was when he first saw her, the conversation had been waiting on his presence all along.

"I am your mother."

"No, you're not, you're a head on a harp. I came into this world between a pair of legs and not two strings twanging!"

"No, Isolde, a part of your mother is trapped in a freaking lyre—of course you're natural-born!"

"Prove it!"

"How can I prove..." If the lyre had hands she would pull out her gold-plated wooden hair at this point. "Look, your father's closest advisor turned out to be an evil sorcerer, and that damned prince you were married to sided with him! Gainard's reward for his treachery was for all of us to be stuck here without our full minds! Your idiot husband can't remember betraying you and you remember a child that never lived because of his betrayal."

"Then what can't you remember, harp?!" At this point, Pawel's fascination with the woman came to bear fruit. She snapped, trying to strangle the little wooden head on the in lyre. "Why do you get to remember all this and I'm stuck with a son that doesn't exist but certainly as hell brought me up here for a reunion from the pits of hell?!"

Pawel wondered how messed up he had to be to fall in love with a woman who was fighting for her sanity in a surreal world. She willingly faced the accusations whether real or lie and just attempted to strangle the truth out of her opposition—something both powerful and heartbreaking to witness. She'd be a woman worth denouncing the throne for.

"Child, I lost things too! I can remember rocking you to sleep, but not the songs I have sung. I can see me kissing your forehead at night, but not the name I gave my sweet baby as she slept!"

The twanging from having the lyre violently jostled almost lost the words before they reached Pawel, but he was already locked in on Isolde so his brain figured it would process the speech later. He just took it in and accepted it for now.

"Then what good does it do for me to know?! Let me have my Jack in peace because it's either a giant who stole my family from me or a husband that betrayed my family, neither of them is a good thing for me to be caged by!"

"We need to escape our situation, let this fake world leave us, and see what we have left."

"But how, harp?! We are stuck here!"

"I can help with that." Pawel finally reached a tiny ledge in the woodwork, which afforded him a chance to fully face them. "All I need you to do is convince him to let all three of you down on the table, and perhaps try to lull him to sleep for half an hour?"

"That I can do, when?" The lyre answered before Isolde.

"It's going to take me most of tomorrow to make what I need, so, do as you wish with him until you see me again, alright?" He started his descent after the harp nodded.

"Jack!" Isolde ran to the bars reaching through like she could touch him.

"You must know I'm not your son by now, M'Lady."

"I don't know anything save that I trust you."

Pawel had to shake his head. Him? Trustworthy? He didn't think he agreed with that. He may have been raised to be a good king, but as a man, he could be as much a rank bastard as the next. The only genuine man he knew of in his household was Olbrecht. But still, his heart spoke for him before he could figure out what he really wanted. "I will do my best for you, Isolde."

With that, he ignored the tableau. There was no guarantee that they would continue without him, anyway.